The Awakening In Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
The Awakening is the first stage of a female coming of age story where the character becomes aware that her current life condition is a hindrance to her goals. Therefore, this leaves the character questioning her values, her social status, her gender and most significantly, her voice. Both Kambili and Maya, like the true protagonists of a female bildungsroman, exhibit a sense of awakening which includes the recognition and bitter acceptance of their limitations. When the cultural, religious, geographical and psychological limitations are summed, what emerges is coercing silence for reasons that are not only complex, but also constantly changing.
In Purple Hibiscus, Adichie emphasizes the dominant role of Papa in Kambili’s life. Kambili struggles to not only make her mouth function, but also her own thoughts and opinions within the
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However, in contrast to the moral support Kambili receives from her mother and brother, Maya’s relatives become annoyed and frustrated at her silence and call her "impudent" (Angelou 72). When Maya then returns to Arkansas, she enters a metaphorical "cocoon" (Angelou 86). The idea of a cocoon indicates sequestration and solitude, however foreshadows rebirth. Likewise, when Kambili returns from Nsukka, and she is caught with a painting of her pagan grandfather, her father abuses her to the extent in which she “lay on the floor, curled tight like the picture of a child in the uterus” (Adichie 210). Her retreat to the maternal womb may be perceived as a breakaway from paternal authority and like Maya’s metaphorical cocoon, foreshadows Kambili’s metamorphism. As Maya struggles to keep the past from defining her and as Kambili struggles to live with her father and her flaccid and abused mother, how will the two protagonists find their
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